In the field of information technology, enterprise applications typically include numerous business systems. The software for each business system may be developed independently. This independent approach usually introduces challenges when the independently developed applications are deployed in a manner in which they must interact with each other. This may be especially so given the increasingly integrated nature of the typical enterprise application.
The testing of the integration, e.g., the calls between business systems, is known as staging, also end-to-end testing. Staging is intended to identify potential problems that may arise when independently developed applications interact with each other. Typically, this type of testing is performed at the end of a release cycle. In some cases, due to time and other resource constraints, staging may not be performed at all.